October 2009 : Bollywood’s crisis of Originality and Sense

‘No-brainers’ and ‘borrowed ideas’ seem to be the flavour of the season. What is even more astonishing is the fact that they’re arriving one-after-the-other. If the preceding sentences aren’t sufficiently suggestive, then let me clarify that I am referring to the Bollywood films that have been released this October. Since they form one of the largest portions of our total media consumption, it would be interesting to retrospect what we’ve consumed over the last one month.

Before I proceed, I’d like to state that my argument would be limited to only a few films, though it is applicable to almost all the Bollywood films released in October. The films under my scanner are the ones with the bigger budgets & major star casts. Let’s first talk about Blue which was widely promoted as the most expensive Bollywood film till date. It turned out to be a “clichéd underwater thriller” wherein the protagonists get to find a lost treasure. Now that is a sort of story for which one doesn’t need to look for a film from the west, from which the story may have been ‘inspired’. If the producers are to be believed, then it took over Rs. 100 crore to make Blue, which becomes somewhat evident after seeing the number of underwater stunts & action sequences in the film. Unfortunately the 100 crores did little for the script, which seems to have been written to somehow accommodate the idea of finding some treasure. Despite a large number of sharks guarding it, the treasure is found almost effortlessly; but what happens before, during and after the treasure hunt is something that film critic Sonia Chopra (of Sify) describes as “a ruined affair….wasting all the moolah its producers pumped in.”

So, Blue turns out to be a film which manages to lure the viewer to buy a ticket, mainly because of the way it has been promoted; but fails to leave any impact which is evident from the fact that after an impressive opening collection of 32 crores in the first week, the collections have dropped by 50% in the second week itself.  Sonia Chopra sums it up by saying, “A shoddy script and corny dialogues leave ‘Blue’ in all despair… In totality, ‘Blue’ is a damp squib that fails to live up to the expectations it had raised.”

Acid Factory was another highly stylized action-flick which was released in the month of October. It is a little known fact that this film is a remake of a lesser known Hollywood movie called Unknown. However, it is very much in line with producer Sanjay Gupta’s style of film-making which usually includes men in black, women in high heels, bikes, cars, industrial settings and above all, storylines that are brazenly lifted from Hollywood. Acid factory is a story about a motley group comprising an undercover cop, a bunch of crooks and two hostages who find themselves locked inside an acid factory, suffering from partial amnesia. Before the faceless gangster, plaguing them on the phone, reaches them, they must find out their forgotten identities and loyalties. Doesn’t this narrative sound familiar? It surely does to me, for it’s a formula that has been utilized in Hollywood films and American T.V. series time and again. Moreover, ‘partial amnesia’ seems to be on the way of becoming the most popular mental ailment in Hindi cinema, especially after being shown in the Aamir Khan starrer Ghajini (a big budget, action flick) last year and Acid Factory this year. Keeping the ‘remake’ aspect of Acid Factory aside, the film also couldn’t click at the box office. According to Box Office of India it was a disaster, with a final gross of Rs. 3,83,00,000. This amount is nothing compared to the film’s budget of Rs. 25 crore, including print and publicity. In a slightly different way of saying the same thing, the problem with Acid Factory seems to be that it scores high in “edgy violence” & style but falls short on drama. Film critic Mihir Fadnavis of India.com, who gave the film 1 and a half star out of 5, dismisses the film by saying that “Acid Factory is a deluge of bullets and chop-socky madness devoid of style or purpose.”

The month of October also witnessed the release of London Dreams, a Bollywood flick ‘inspired’ from the legendary film Amadeus which won 8 Oscars  in 1984. Amadeus was based on the rivalry of music composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri. Similarly London Dreams sees a lesser talented Ajay Devgan articulating a similar angst against his gifted friend, Salman Khan, who steals the thunder, despite his disinterest in super stardom. However, the similarity ends here because London Dreams has a plot that often borders on the implausible. For instance, Ajay Devgan’s journey from Bhatinda to London, his growing up in an alien country on his own by playing flute at street corners, his forming a band with a group of stagglers, his instantaneous rise to popularity by singing songs in Hindi in front of an English audience, and his sudden emotional outburst to a 90,000-strong crowd in the Wembley stadium, all lack depth. The effortless spontaneity with which the story unfolds makes the script writer’s imagination somewhat unrealistic. Noted film critic Rajeev Masand made a scathing review of the movie, describing it as a “frustratingly foolish film about foolish people”. Rediff.com goes onto slam the remake quotient of the film by writing – “And while London Dreams may have liberally borrowed from the classic Amadeus, it comes across as one of those ‘Made-in-China’ copies. There’s nothing inside.” The 70 crore budget of London Dreams provide it technical flourish and the lavish canvas, but the script writing of Suresh Nair has been graded as “poor and dim-witted” by the critics. All in all, London Dreams comes across as a borrowed idea which is also low on IQ.

The abbreviation IQ which stands for intelligence quotient, also reminds of a host of October releases that seem to be completely deprived of it. All The Best, Fruit & Nut and Aladin all fall under this category. Out of these three films, All The Best has the biggest budget, of around Rs. 35 crore. Devgn Productions, under whose banner this film has been made, claim they’ve spent Rs 5 crore on publicity while sources say they have actually spent double of that. Notwithstanding this huge amount, the storyline of this film is probably the lamest among all the releases mentioned so far. Inspired by the play Right Bed, Wrong Husband, it’s a star-studded affair, featuring seasoned actors like Sanjay Dutt and Ajay Devgan. The star cast was utilized to its fullest during the promotion of the film, appearing even during commercial breaks on sports channels, wishing the Indian Cricket team ‘All the best’ for an upcoming cricket tournament. However, using the media is just a means to bring people to the cinema halls.  It doesn’t prevent the viewers and reviewers from speaking their mind. “There’s no real plot to speak of. Basically, anything and everything in All The Best happens with the sole aim of generating a joke. Try and make sense of this and you will end up giving yourself a headache.” , is how Rediff.com describes All The Best.

I do not feel the need, nor am I motivated to exemplify the crisis of originality and sense any more. So the end result of this diagnosis is that the crores of rupees invested in developing expensive sets, star casts, styling, stunts and promotion have gone to a waste, primarily because the script writing was paid the least attention among all the aspects. As a reminder, India is a country where a vast majority of the citizens don’t even know the number of zeroes in a 100 crore or even a 50 crore for that matter. It is a fact that the people go to the cinemas for entertainment, but it is also true that they expect value for their money. The Bollywood films released this October certainly disappoint the viewers and give nothing in return, apart from making them pay out of their recession-hit-hard-earned money. I’d like to end my argument by stating a remark from my software engineer brother whose main source of recreation are the films that he watches on saturdays & sundays when he doesn’t have any work. He says, “I think I’ve wasted all my weekends in October.”

- GIRIJA

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